"This Novel Will Destroy Me."

On researching The Queen of the Night, my second novel, part 1 of 2.

“This novel will destroy me,” the title of this letter, is from a Tweet that won an early Twitter contest back in the first year of Twitter, 2008, when we used to text our Tweets from our flip phones. Colson Whitehead was the judge. I don’t recall the prompt and I have since deleted my account, but I remember the prize was a Sony e-reader I gave to a friend. What I remember most was that I was by then a few years past the deadline for my second novel and I feared privately that I’d made a terrible mistake, an unsolvable one.

That year I was living in Amherst, Massachusetts, the visiting writer at Amherst College. I had access for the first time to research money as a part of my teaching job and I also had supportive colleagues, like the professor of music married to the professor of French History, who were happy to answer my questions. I had filled a room in my apartment with books from the library, a stack of 60 as I recall, created by tracking down books out of the bibliographies of other books I’d read.

Looking back on how I researched The Queen of the Night, I will say it can be hard to remember what you didn’t know. But when I went through my drafts this summer from an older blog I kept at the time, I came across three posts, published and unpublished, about a 2008 trip that was pivotal for my second novel, The Queen of the Night. They tell a story set just before Obama’s election, the era of what we call “the financial crisis” or the Great Recession.

When I began the novel in 1999, I conceived it as a story about an opera singer who performed in public tragedies while hiding her own private tragedies. But that sounds more intellectual than what I experienced, which was more like being haunted by someone who had never lived. The narrator, Lilliet, woke me up from sleep with a line, as if she was speaking inside my head, and she just kept talking, and so I got up to make coffee, flipping my laptop open and typing as the lines came. She seemed so urgent.

I had not been to Paris on that first morning, and I knew only a little French, learned in college, in an introductory class that often left me feeling like a tourist in a foreign airport. I had not read Proust, or Zola, did not know who Cora Pearl was, did not know about Hausmann or Marie Cornelie Falcon, or Pauline Viardot Garcia, much less the Comtesse di Castiglione, my novel’s eventual antagonist.

The most autobiographical part of the novel is that like Lilliet, my main character and narrator, I knew very little about Paris when I began with her and would have to learn it all on my own.

A few critics of the novel were irritated at the attention I paid to Lilliet’s clothes, the subject of this two part series, and I can only say that to take that attitude is to misunderstand the situation of the women of the Second Empire, who took their clothes very seriously as a way to communicate status, which was not idle for them, but a matter of life and death. And they learned to do so from the way the culture was organized to judge them for those choices on a daily basis, from the Empress Eugenie and her court, to her rivals, to the women everywhere around her.

The Empress Eugenie’s shifts in fashion have often been written about as a way of criticizing her, but I found empathy for her when I learned that she was most likely trying to copy the clothes of the Emperor’s many mistresses. I have wondered if it was simply a way to tell him she knew who he was sleeping with, but I am sure this behavior only alienated him even further.

The women of France at this time were bound by a number of laws that I educated myself about as a way to write about them. From learningGeorge Sand for example I learned that it was illegal for women to wear pants, which she did all the same, as a way to enter all-male establishments. Women could bend or break laws of this kind if they were celebrities, and that status would confer something like parity with the men around them, but only as long as they were famous. When that fame vanished, so did the protection. Clothes were a part of this. Creating a scandal with your clothes also. They were her tools as much as her voice.

*

This trip begins when I learned from a friend in Paris that there would be a show of the clothes of the Empress Eugenie and her court called “Sous l’Empire des Crinolines 1852-1870” at the Palais Galliera, Museé de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. He was a friend who had been helping me with my research, and who knew what it would mean to me to see this show. There was an intimacy with the clothes that I needed, and short of being able to try them on, I went.

There was also, somehow at the same time, an exhibit out at Compiegne, the autumn palace of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, where someone was going to stage her clothes in mannequins inside the palace. I could see both shows. It felt like a divine intervention on my behalf, which, it should be said, is also part of what the novel is about—the seduction of the feeling that your fate is at work.

And now to 2008 and the dresses.

The Opera Ball, a photograph by Pierre Louis Pierson, who took over 700 photographs of Virginia Oldoni, also known as The Comtesse de Castiglione, the model here—perhaps the most photographed woman of the 19th Century. The above photo was one I had first wanted as a book cover and is in the Metropolitan Museum Open Access catalog.

Paris, France

October 10th, 2008

On the day I leave for my research trip to Paris, I stop by the bank to ask about the overseas teller withdrawal maximum amounts while I’m in France. I will need to withdraw money for the rent on the apartment there. The woman teller is wild-eyed when she looks up as if caught at doing something much more serious than a simple transaction. And before she says anything, I know she's incapable of helping me. I consider the etiquette of asking for someone else’s help even as I abandon the idea, and just ask my question. Is there is a withdrawal limit and if so what is it.

She squints at the screen. “Well...” She looks over at the next teller and asks her to come over, as I knew she might. “What is that,” she asks, pointing at my card. “You take money out on that card?” She looks at me as if I am a nosy child.

“Yes,” I reply. I think of all the money I have taken out with this card, a river of cash suddenly in my mind, the debit card an improbable spigot.

“Hunh.” She squints at the screen. “I've had people in with that card who couldn't take out money.”

“Well don't change anything,” I say, with an abrupt suddenness that surprises us both. “What's my daily limit,” I ask again. This seems easy, like something any of them could look up.

“1000,” she says, “and then if the machine is offline, 1500.”

This makes no sense to me at all, and in fact seems indicative of everything wrong with my country's financial problems. I still have to go to get a dental crown put in, teach about Persepolis and Helen of Troy, and then drive to the Newark airport. I don't ask about offline then. I instead have a brief fantasy of taking out all of my money, right there, and buying jewelry at the duty free on my way to Paris. I imagine myself going through passport control, my hands covered in jeweled rings, a fancy watch. I can still stare for days at jeweled rings in a Fifth Avenue store display, or get lost in the light coming off a tray of costume jewelry in a junk shop.

“Thanks,” I say instead.

“Have a nice trip,” she says, still squinting at her screen.

*

On my Air India flight to Paris, a beautiful male steward gives me 4 bottles of Gordon's gin when I ask for a gin and tonic, along with 2 glasses full of ice and two cans of tonic. I wonder briefly if he's joining me for a drink and decide I must look like a man who needs a bit of restocking in advance.

Air India is a revelation. It’s my first time on the airline. I found the ticket for 203.00 each way and leapt on it, immediately.

I hadn’t planned the trip in advance. I was looking for flights after a friend who lives there in Paris, who we’ll call Brandon, had pointed out that there were to be exhibits of the Empress Eugenie’s clothes. One at the Galliera and the other at the Chateau de Compiégne, her autumn palace. After trying to imagine her for a few years in that place, it is as if someone has taken the trouble to dress mannequins in her clothes, staging her for me, all but begging me to come.

The cocktails and the movies are included, though the headphones in my seat pocket don't fit the socket. I say nothing, not wanting the steward to feel badly, and instead watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirl silently in their classic movie, a pleasant reverie of a kind. Eventually my seatmates and I get to talking. They are American, a young writer and her boyfriend. He is impressed that I am published. He asks me about it, what it must be like.

“It's... a bit weird,” I say.

He wrinkles his brow.

“This thing you've carried in your head for years is suddenly on a shelf, where any stranger can go look at it, read it, have opinions. It takes some getting used to,” I say.

They nod. They see all my gin bottles and order gin also. “You don't even drink gin,” the writer says to her boyfriend, laughing.

*

On the plane to Paris, I read articles about a new show coming to HBO, called Americatown. It imagines a future when Chinatown-style American ghettoes have sprung up all over the world, as Americans leave, looking for greater opportunity elsewhere. For some reason I remember a taxi ride in Los Angeles a few years ago, when the driver told me that he was moving back to India, so his son could get a decent education. I asked him about it. He was upset, having made so many sacrifices to come to the US, to find the math and science educations so lacking.

I imagine Americans, forced to go overseas to get a decent education in math and science. For the rest of the trip, when I walk past the restaurants offering American food, I will think of this show and the taxi driver.

I have gone to Paris for the next thing in my head. The city seems full of handsome men with shaved heads. In my bag I have clothes for 5 days, 2 notebooks, pens, a sketchbook and a camera. I left the computer behind. I am writing this in a notebook from the Rue de Rivoli, where a cute waiter is making tight turns around the tables and flirting with the men behind me, who are very taken with him. All of the chairs are facing the street and no one pretends they are not there to watch everyone pass by.

*

In the apartment I rent in Paris, there’s cable television, something I purposely don't have at home. I eye it warily as the woman agent taking care of the rental details turns it on. I didn't bring my computer because I feared being online too much out of habits from home, for example. I don’t want another source of nonstop news about America.

It’s not that I’m addicted to news. When at home, I read the news constantly because for the last 8 years I've felt as if I had somehow accidentally accepted a ride from a drunk driver. Reading the news seemed to me like looking out the window to see if we would crash and not reading the news was lying on the floor of the car, waiting for it to crash. For this time in Paris I wanted some other options for my life.

The agent leaves, and I watch a few moments of television. Wolf Blitzer is smiling as he says things like candidates, battle, battleground. He sees himself as a postmodern boxing announcer for the Frasier-Lewis fight of this century. He is saying this from inside my country, the place I have to go back to when the trip is done, so I turn off the television and go downstairs out on the sidewalk, where I use one of the glass cabin phone booths there and some coins to call Brandon.

We make a few plans and then he adds, “Antoine would like us to go to this chateau on Saturday, for a picnic,” Brandon says. “They light it with candles at night on Saturdays, and open it to the public.”

“Sounds great,” I say. Not knowing quite how much this will be true.

*

The Galliera show’s poster, an image of a dress half uncovered to show the crinolines and the wire cage, is on many of the bus shelters, almost like a trail you could follow around Paris. When I arrive I am more prepared than I realized.

Having read the journals of the Brothers Goncourt I recognize the names of most if not all of the women whose clothes are included in the show. I am especially impressed by those included from the Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, who the brothers loved to write about, and who did have exquisite taste and who deeply hated the Empress Eugenie. She was one of several women who had thought they might be Napoleon III’s empress who funded his rise to power. Princess Mathilde had a famous diamond brooch in the shape of a rose she used as a part of that effort. She was maybe the first of these women, engaged to him young, and the engagement broken after his first failed attempt to seize power.

My favorite portrait of the Empress Eugénie, by Gustave Le Gray, 1856. The Metropolitan Museum Open Access.

Photographs are forbidden, I learn, when I try to take one, but when I see others snapping photos later, I let myself take a few as subtly as I can—I have been caught once after all. But photographs, even those I take myself, are not why I am here, so I try to really look at and study the details of the garments. I have looked at photos too much. I am here in part because they have done all they can. I have to imagine wearing them. I have to imagine dressing someone in them.

The colors are vivid still in many of the clothes. I learn a whole system of etiquette, an articulated social world, in the names of the different clothes: the visiting costume, the tea gown, the afternoon dress, the evening bodice, the opera bodice, the court presentation train. The quaint idea that a celebrity should not repeat a dress comes from this time, from the Empress Eugénie, who did not want to see any of her guests in a gown she’d seen them wear before, even though she herself was known to wear flannels under her ermine cape during official court business. She would also give clothes away to her favorites but these also could not be worn in front of her. For the opening of the Suez Canal, the empress is said to have ordered 250 gowns from the House of Worth for the occasion, her favorite dressmakers. The women guests at the autumn palace had to come with three or four changes of clothes for the week’s visit, changing clothes for much of the day. And yet when she became more involved in the business of the Empire during the Emperor’s illness, and left off some of her social role in that season, these same women felt snubbed and turned on her. It is often remarked on that Eugénie felt she was supporting French industry by demanding this, as if she alone wanted this parade, but they did also. They had sacrificed tremendously to be there at Compiégne, some of their husbands selling entire businesses to be able to pay their dressmakers bills—and so they wanted their empress to see their clothes.

But it is one thing to know this and another to be here, to see even some of these clothes in this show, suspended in the air on wire or hung behind glass like butterfly specimens. And so I walk the aisles, trying to lace them into my mind.

I do not see any gowns from Napoleon III’s most controversial lover, the Comtesse de Castliglione, whose clothes I most admire out of all of these women. And it is clear the Empress never, at least that I could see, copied her.

The photographs of the Comtesse were her way of commemorating her most famous costumes at first. Here is one of her most notorious, The Queen of Hearts, worn at her first ball in Paris, as she set out to seduce the Emperor. Pierre Louis Pierson, 1861-1863, Met Open Access.

Part 2 comes next week.